Smith-Rhodes

Miss Smith-Rhodes appears once in the canon, in a list of Assassins' Guild School teachers linked to the school Houses for which they are Housemaster or Mistress. This was created for the Assassins' Guild Diary. Therefore the only two canonical facts about her are that her name is Miss Smith-Rhodes (no forename or initials are given) and that she is housemistress of the presumably all-female Raven House. An inferred detail is that she is one of a group of female teachers, only three of whom are named in the canon, who were employed especially to deal with the influx of female pupils enrolled after the Assassins' School went fully co-educational. Her closest colleagues are therefore the Right Honourable Miss Alice Band, and Madame les Deux-Epées, as well as the pre-existing and formerly the only woman teacher at the School, Lady T'malia.

Annotation

Cecil Rhodes was a Victorian adventurer passionately committed to expanding the British Empire. He put his money where his life was, and with minimal assistance conquered modern-day Zimbabwe for the British, calling it, with superb modesty, Rhodesia. His ultimate goal was a British-controlled railway system starting in Cairo and finishing in South Africa that bisected the continent at its longest point but at no point left British territory. He got it. And if Cecil Rhodes created the colony of Rhodesia and was its first governor, a chap called Ian Smith, dedicated to maintaining white colonial rule into the very late 1970's, was its last colonial Prime Minister before Rhodesia became Zimbabwe...

Given that names like this very rarely happen accidentally to Discworld characters, Miss Smith-Rhodes could be a Howondalandian adventurer, perhaps with a regrettably reactionary turn of mind? She would have the capacity to organise really interesting nature trails, summer camps and field trips... somehow I see her as having the Discworld equivalent of a Sed-Efrrrrikan accent and dressing in safari suits...

And in the context of academia, a Rhodes Scholar is a gifted student from the white British Empire (Canada, Australia, New Zealand - and South Africa), or like Bill Clinton and others from the United States, who gets to study for free, and with a grant, at Oxford ... for this number of referents to come together in a single character name strongly suggests someting is going on here.